LibreOffice upgrade targets Windows integration and power users

iPhone remote control also coming soon for LibreOffice presentations.

LibreOffice 4.2 is now out, featuring improved integration with Windows and new features for power users and the enterprise.

"LibreOffice 4.2 offers two Windows-specific improvements for business users: a simplified custom install dialog to avoid potential mistakes, and the ability to centrally manage and lock-down the configuration with Group Policy Objects via Active Directory," the Document Foundation wrote in an announcement today. "All users benefit from better integration with Windows 7 and 8, with thumbnails of open documents now grouped by application and a list of recent documents, both showing on the task bar."

Windows users aren't the only ones to benefit from the latest release of the open source office suite, which is also available on OS X and Linux.

"Calc has gone through the largest code refactoring ever, giving major performance wins for big data (especially when calculating cell values and importing large and complex XLSX spreadsheets), while an optional new formula interpreter enables massively parallel calculation of formula cells using the GPU via OpenCL," the Document Foundation said. "Round-trip interoperability with Microsoft OOXML, particularly for DOCX, as well as legacy RTF, has also improved considerably."

In addition to improving the desktop applications, LibreOffice is about to get an Impress Remote Control for iOS, letting iPhone users control presentations from their mobile devices. The app is awaiting review from Apple and should hit the App Store soon. Impress Remote is already available for Android.

Promoted Comments

FYI: On MacOS, you can download a 64-build of 4.2.0, and if you do, the Oracle JDKs integrate with it properly, which means the JDBC support works. This is the first time I've been able to easily get JDBC support working in LibreOffice for some years now. I figured other MacOS users might want to know.

(I believe you have to make a point of downloading the 64-bit build. They seem to default to the 32-bit build, which works with older versions of MacOS.)